BlueHat Prize v1.0 Finalists – One of These People Will Win $200,000 (AKA Mad Loot)!

Rank: Senior Security Strategist Lead, Head of Microsoft’s Security Community and Strategy Team

Likes: Cool vulns, BlueHat, soldering irons, quantum teleportation

Dislikes: Rudeness, socks-n-sandals, licorice

When we announced the BlueHat Prize on August 3, 2011, we did something that no major vendor had ever done before – offer a large cash prize for defensive security research. While a few vendors and others were offering relatively small cash incentives for security researchers to find and report individual vulnerabilities, we decided that, as a platform provider, Microsoft would be most effective if it sought out new, platform-level, defensive technologies that could possibly help defend against entire classes of vulnerabilities. These defenses could help protect our own applications, and have the potential to protect third-party applications that run on our platform.

We received 20 entries to our inaugural BlueHat Prize contest, a response and participation from the security research community that exceeded our expectations. We now know contestants emerged from different areas of the security community – some from academia, some recognized names in the hacker community, and some from other venues entirely. Interestingly, about half of the entries poured in during the last few days – and even the last few hours and minutes— of the contest entry period. Also of note, most of the top-rated entries were among those last-minute submissions, perhaps substantiating the old adage that brilliance emerges under the glaring pressure of a looming deadline. One thing we learned from this experience was not to set future contest deadlines for midnight on a Sunday!

Getting down to business, here are the names of the three finalists, in alphabetical order:

Jared DeMott

Ivan Fratric

Vasilis Pappas

We will award the prizes to the winners at a 10 p.m. ceremony at our researcher appreciation party on July 26, 2012. We have notified the finalists that they have made it to the finals. The finalists won’t know who won which prize – the grand prize of $200,000 USD, the second prize of $50,000 USD, and the third prize of an MSDN subscription, valued at $10,000 USD – until we reveal it to them and the world live on July 26.

You can read a little about each of them and their proposed solutions on our BlueHat Prize contest site. After the contest is over, we’ll also be putting up the names and abstracts of the other contestants, so stay tuned for that update sometime after Black Hat.

For now, please join us as we congratulate all the contestants, and especially the three finalists. We appreciate their hard work, and are excited that we can help showcase their ideas that can help make advancements in platform-level security defense.